Anna Funder delivers the third public lecture in the 2008 series of Sydney PEN Voices: The 3 Writers Project.

She will speak on the subject of COURAGE on Wednesday 12 November 2008 in Sydney (followed by a conversation with Tom Keneally)- Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Anna Funder

Anna Funder, born 1966, is an Australian writer who grew up in Melbourne. She studied creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, also later studying at the Free University of Berlin as the recipient in 1994 of a DAAD Scholarship (German Government Academic Exchange Service Award). In 1995 after the Berlin Wall came down she applied for and received a Fellowship from the AGA to return to Germany.
Funder has worked as an international lawyer and in public relations for a German overseas television service in Berlin. Living and working in Berlin inspired her to write her first book, the non-fiction work Stasiland, which explores the machinations of the secret police known as the Stasi in the former German Democratic Republic. She was awarded the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2004.

Anna Funder discusses a view linking moral reasoning in humans to a communal understanding. This opposes the Veneer Theory, which likens morality to a veneer covering of "our darker, more animal natures."